The second plank in her platform is that compassion is, as it were, the distilled essence of the world’s great religions…

But is she correct in suggesting that, au fond, the essence of the main religions boils down to compassion? It is probably correct where Buddhism is concerned and it is from Buddhism that her best insights and examples come. I think she is on shakier ground when she applies it to Christianity and Islam. Christianity and Islam are redemption religions, not wisdom religions. They exist to secure life in the world to come for their followers and any guidance they offer on living in this world is always with a view to its impact on the next.

Yer humble servant:

The categorical assertion of the Charter for Compassion is very strong: “The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions.” The problem with that should be obvious: it is not true. The principle of obedience to God lies at the heart of many religious traditions, and it is a modern illusion to think that is identical to compassion.

See? Same thing. Redemption religions; obedience to God. The important (really very important indeed) point is that there is something in religions of that type that trumps (earthly) compassion. That means it’s just a mistake, and a dangerous one, to pretend otherwise.

Meanwhile, comment on the New Humanist review, so that Caspar will think I’m wildly popular and ask me to do more reviews.

14 Responses to “The one thing needful”

Absolutely. Richard Holloway’s short review is very good, actually, especially where he comes to speak of the whiff of the disingenuous. It is, he says, “the way she and I and many others hold on to the great scriptural tropes, but it is not how the church’s official teachers hold them: the Pope, for example, would clearly dismiss it as an error or a heresy.” It is not clear to me what the point is of holding on to the great scriptural tropes, but it is abundantly clear that this is not the heart of the religion.

And your review is very good indeed — I seem unable to sign in with any of these popule ID domains. I’ve tried OpenID, and though I’ve been told that I have confirmed my openID email address, I still can’t sign in. So I have simply given up. But your review is good. I think you are particularly good on the idea of recycled ideas. That’s something I noticed and have commented on before. Armstrong has one book, and she keeps rewriting it. But she is, as you say, terribly earnest, and simply hopelessly wrong about most religion. Why do people think that religion answers to their needs? It never does. Every member of a religion has his or her own, just like Armstrong does. That’s what happens when there is no basis for confirming religious beliefs, at least no non-arbitrary way. You can tell Caspar the friendly ghost from me that I think you do great reviews and that I think you should get a chance to do more of them.

Armstrong’s problem, which she fails to recognize because her intellect is too limited, is that once she reduces organized religions to the merely touchy-feely-warm-fuzzy emotions (which can only be done by ignoring those religions’ own scriptures), there is no basis left for the organized religion at all. If everybody decides for themselves what religious ‘truth’ actually is – and I certainly agree that is how it ought to be – there must inevitably be conflict with any organized religion because these can only exist by telling people what they must believe.

As for the compassion at the heart of religion, read the glorious Koran suras 2 – 9, or Leviticus and Deuteronomy, or the polemic that is John’s gospel then show me the compassion. Read a history of medieval religions and show me where the compassion is there. Compassion is an individual trait and most members of organized religion haven’t got far enough along to acquire it.

Thanks very much Eric! (I always have struggles with those fancy comment systems too. Now that I use Facebook and [sigh] Twitter I can use them, which is easier.) (I too thought Holloway’s review was very good. I was thinking about his experience with the “homosexuals are damned” guy…”Holloway should just take that final step and escape, like Eric.”)

This is why I think Armstrong’s myth project has about it a whiff of the disingenuous.

Fiar enough, but, seriously, how do we disarm religion without disingenuity? I don’t read Armstrong – I’ve received sufficient warning – but I’ve come to regard her mission as a noble, if futile, endeavor, like John Shelby Spong’s. Without the supernatural, religion is a hell of a lot less dangerous than with.

During the final stages of shedding myself of all things theologic, I continued to read a lot of Spong. He seemed to argue himself into a conclusion of non-belief in various and all aspects of Christian doctrine, yet never took the logical and absolutely reasonable final step. I always thought it was a shame, worrying that he would stumble badly on his cognitive dissonance and hurt himself. Oh well!

As I see it, Armstrong’s major achievement is her History of God. That is a book I have been looking out for in the secondhand shops, if only to see how a propagandist like Armstrong comes to terms with the indisputable fact that the concept of God has had a (relatively recent) beginning in time and has continuously evolved, its period of most rapid transformation and speciation being arguably the present.

But given that, any history that God might have had prior to say 13,000 BCE (as I recall it, the date of the foundation of Jericho) is pretty well unknowable.

I do not believe that the Old Testament is geologically or palaeontologically reliable.

If Armstrong’s major achievement is A History of God, it is a very flawed achievement indeed. I sold my copy to a second hand bookstore years ago. It’s not really worth the paper it was printed on. It says practically nothing that is new, and says much that is simply wrong. Armstrong is not a scholar, and the depth of her ignorance is vast. God has no history before 1300 BCE (roughly), and it was not until the arrival of secondary monotheistic religions that the history of God really begins. Akhenaten started the ball rolling. The ball was caught by Moses, dribbled by the Jews, snatched from them by Christians, and finally claimed by Muslims who grabbed it, ran with it into the desert, and delude themselves with the thought that only they can play the game.

The difference between the organic religions (primary religions), that are intrinsic cultural features of a particular people, culture, language and locality, and the intellectual religions (secondary religions), religions of the book, which try to distinguish between true and false religion whose claims apply to everyone, and therefore need transcendent punishments and rewards to enforce belief in the absence of cultural imperatives, is a fundamental one, not always recognised. The need for horrendous punishment to counterbalance the supposed bliss of its rewards, means that such redemption religions cannot, at their heart, be about love and compassion. God’s love and compassion created a hell where people are thought to suffer forever.

Such religions, however much they protest to the contrary, are intrinsically violent and dangerous. The imagined punishments of hell are thought to be deserved. Those who deserve such punishment may be treated with similar violence by God’s servants now. This is one reason why Holloway’s attempt to turn a religion of the book into a cultural religion is misguided. Intellectual religion will not map onto an organic culture. The two are completely different in origin, and serve different purposes. That is why preserving scriptural tropes is a luxury we cannot afford. What Holloway and Armstrong need to remember is that religions of the book make truth claims which cannot be made good, but which nevertheless demand our allegiance under the threat of eternal punishments which can be anticipated here. Such claims are dangerous.

It appears to me that in the struggle between the various religions for survival in the world after the invention of writing, those with word-of-god texts moved quickly to the front rank. This reflected the competition going on between commercial and political interests, where the literate easily beat the illiterate. So the textless religions of Greece and Rome got displaced by those that originated amongst literate people of servile status, or were imposed by literate warlords leading desert tribes.

Interestingly, Genghis Khan’s sole relgious legacy in the huge area covered by his brief empire was the help he gave to the spread of Islam; because he had nothing text-based of his own to offer, or even to try to impose.